It was on the fourth day of June, 2024 in the early morning hours before the sun burned through the clouds and made the roads shimmer that Terrence realized how to be the writer he dreamed of being. He hadn’t slept well for weeks. Each night grew shorter and more restless, his wife stirring more and more in agitation as he went from sleeping, to awake, to playing on his phone and casting bright light across the night-blackened bedroom.
He didn’t know why he couldn’t sleep. He thought it was the heat at first. They never set the thermostat below 80, but the fan in their room, which kept temperature all by itself, clicked lazily between 83 and 84. The sheets were damp around his neck and shoulders and he had what he believed to be flop sweat. Yet through all that an image continued to pulsate in his minds eye. It was so vivid, so realistic that he thought he could see it in his bedroom, just beyond the reach of the cellphone’s screenlight. He turned the phone in this direction and that, searching for something that couldn’t be there–something that could not be at all. Then he went back to the screen and typed in these six words: What to do about going crazy. There were a lot of results. Quora popped up just below the Ai inspired answer that google provided. He swiped up, scrolling the screen downward towards the multicolored Google symbol with an inconsiderate number of ‘o’s and clicked on the number 10, situated just below the last of the ‘o’s.
This was common practice for Terrance by now. He wiped sweat from his head with his empty right hand and flicked it further down the bed. The first two results on any page were always sponsored hits, but he’d come to learn that by page ten the listed results got interesting. Here he found a blog called Tiny Buddha that talked about how pain could cause us to act crazy in relationships. Further down the list was posts about Trump making all of us crazy and something called the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors bracketed by even more sponsored results. Still nothing about what he saw in his minds eye, or perhaps just beyond the light this very bedroom.
He put the phone down on his chest. It glowed against the dingy gray sheets. His wife stirred again. He stared into the darkness across the room, thinking. Waiting. It the hints of the dream from which he’d emerged there’d been an answer. There’d been something. When he’d opened his eeyes he’d seen it, or at least thought he’d seen it. Now, as the fog of sleep lifted, he couldn’t quite remember what it had been. It’d been an answer, he knew that much. But how?